Monday, April 25, 2011

Life Cycle of a Butterfly

Now that I have the frog life cycle out of the way, I can start posting about our butterflies! This is my absolute favorite thing to teach in all of the world. Ha. For the past six years, I've always bought caterpillars from Insect Lore and we've watched them turn into butterflies. Unlike the frogs, these NEVER died. This year was close, though. I put the container of caterpillars on our document camera to get a closer look. I accidentally left it on all night long, and it over heated, filling the container with condensation. I was worried, but luckily all five caterpillars survived! Here are some of the products I bought to use with this unit. All from Insect Lore {can you tell I love LOVE this store?}.

Just like the frogs, this book has tons of fun activities to do with caterpillars/butterflies. I do a lot from it. And just like the frog pond, it has the idea for a butterfly garden to display to life cycle stages. We've only done the first three stages... we'll do butterflies sometime this week. But here's our wall so far.

not so good cell phone pic

rice

pipe cleaner, marker for the legs and antennae

yarn wrapped around a pipe cleaner

On Thursday, our first butterfly hatched. The other looked like it was so close, so I put it under the document camera for us to watch. I left it like that ALL DAY, but of course, at the end of the day when it stopped working, the butterfly finally decided to hatch. They still got to watch it as I held up the net for everyone to see, but not as up-close and personal as I had hoped. I took this picture as we were waiting for it to hatch. I thought it looked really neat. Two chrysalis' are on the left, the first hatched butterfly is on the right.

3 comments:

I love doing the butterfly life cycle, and love all the products from Insect Lore as well! Did you only do 5, though? We always buy a class set so that each child has a caterpillar to observe. It's pretty inexpensive, though I can;t tell you how much, since we order as a grade-level and our PTA covers the cost.

I’ve thought about getting the class set, but it would be a lot more money. Our PTO covers it, too, but for all of first grade to get 5 caterpillars, it costs $95. The one thing I don’t like about it is that we have to do rush shipping; otherwise they grow too much and kind of defeats the purpose. If we all got the pavilion it would be about $250. Maybe next year, when our PTO has more money we’ll have to try it. I think it would be neat for them to each have their own caterpillar. :)

I just found your blog and am getting so many wonderful ideas for next year! We have done the life cycle of a butterfly using pasta noodles and black-eyed peas (for egg). We used rotini (twists) for the larva, shells for the chrysalis, and butterfly pasta for the butterflies.